Killing Stella
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Never before in English, a gripping, razor-sharp novella of a fractured marriage, by the ferociously talented author of THE WALL
Main description: Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, the narrator of KILLING STELLA recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, she worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to another, about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end.
A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, KILLING STELLA distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel THE WALL into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella.
Marlen Haushofer
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian author of short stories, novels, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has had a strong influence on many German-language writers, such as the Nobel Prize–winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to her. The relaunch of her classic The Wall—acclaimed "strange and wondrous" by James Wood in The New Yorker—was a major literary sensation.
More by Marlen Haushofer
Shaun Whiteside
Translated by
Shaun Whiteside has translated from German works by Freud, Schnitzler, Musil and Nietzsche, and, most recently, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink (2011). His translation of Magdalena the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger won the 1996 Schlegel-Tieck Award. He lives in London.
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